Stanford Medicine News
Precision Health
Read about Stanford Medicine's vision for leading the biomedical revolution.
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5 Questions: Euan Ashley on diagnosing the undiagnosable
The National Institutes of Health’s Undiagnosed Diseases Network launches today, and Euan Ashley, MRCP, DPhil, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine and of genetics at the Stanford University School of Medicine, has been named co-chair of the UDN steering committee.
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Roberts Earns Top Ethics Prize
Imagine being terrified you might kill yourself. Then imagine driving 300 miles to the nearest city for psychiatric care because you’re even more afraid someone in your town will find out about your depression. Or worse yet, being so afraid of being labeled “crazy” that you don’t seek care at all.
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Closing In on Cancer
Edgar Engleman's lab gives the immune system 'a little kick in the butt,' to stunning effect.
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Photovoltaic retinal implant could restore functional sight, researchers say
A Stanford cardiac electrophysiologist and colleagues have used a unique research method to learn more about atrial fibrillation. Mintu Turakhia, MD, and collaborators at Medtronic and Massachusetts General Hospital, extracted data out of decades of continuously recorded medical information from implanted medical devices—pacemakers and defibrillators—in 10,000 heart patients. Then they linked it to medical records, and analyzed it.
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Stanford-based Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center to be launched
The National Institutes of Health will fund the establishment of an Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The award, totaling slightly more than $7.3 million, will be dispensed over a five-year period.
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Combination drug therapy shrinks pancreatic tumors in mice
A combination of two drugs, one already approved by the Food and Drug Administration, appears to be effective at shrinking pancreatic cancers in laboratory mice, according to a new study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
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Stanford launches smartphone app to study heart health
A free iPhone app allows users to contribute to a study of human heart health while learning about the health of their own hearts, and uses a new software framework developed by Apple.
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Photovoltaic retinal implant could restore functional sight, researchers say
A team led by Stanford University researchers has developed a wireless retinal implant that they say could restore vision five times better than existing devices.
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Precision Health, Predicting and Preventing Disease
Precision health takes a big-data approach to disease prevention and detection, focusing on the various factors that help maintain health throughout life.
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Doctor, nurses honored for advances made in early days of cardiac care
Alfred Spivack taught nurses to do a number of jobs generally restricted to doctors in the early days of Stanford’s coronary care unit, and also helped to developed new technology for cardiac care.
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Customized DNA rings aid early cancer detection in mice, study finds
Imagine: You pop a pill into your mouth and swallow it. It dissolves, releasing tiny particles that are absorbed and cause only cancerous cells to secrete a specific protein into your bloodstream. Two days from now, a finger-prick blood sample will expose whether you’ve got cancer and even give a rough idea of its extent.
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Stanford Medicine’s Academic Advantage
Leaders from across Stanford Medicine discuss together how Bioinformatics, genomics, and other emerging disciplines promise to transform the very concept of medicine—from treating disease to predicting and preventing it and the common aspiration that exists at Stanford Medicine to improve human health.
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Newly identified molecular network in brain implicated in autism, researchers say
A defect in communication between the two halves of the brain may be responsible for some cases of autism, according to a study by Stanford Medicine researchers in the Department of Genetics.
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'Big data' approach helps pinpoint possible new stent drug to prevent heart attacks
Stanford Medicine researchers hunting for a better drug coating for coronary stents have pinpointed a cancer drug as a possible candidate. “This could have major clinical impact,” according to Euan Ashley, MD, associate professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics.
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Stanford launches major effort to expedite vaccine discovery with $50 million grant
Stanford University has received a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to accelerate efforts in vaccine development. The $50 million grant over 10 years will build on existing technology developed at Stanford to establish the Stanford Human Systems Immunology Center.
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Streamlining cancer care
Sharron Brockman has become all too familiar with cancer. Diagnosed 18 months ago with stage-3 ovarian cancer, Brockman has gone through two rounds of chemotherapy and had to drop out of a clinical trial because of a reaction to one of the medications. But when she decided to continue her treatment this spring at the Stanford Cancer Center, the Sacramento resident came across something new: her own multidisciplinary care coordinator.
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Mix and Match: Seeking unexpected treatments in biomedical databases
Researchers have found a new way to draw on the world’s wealth of biological data: They’re digging through it to find new uses for old drugs—a strategy called drug repositioning.
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On shaky ground: Building to withstand a major earthquake
The new Stanford Hospital is being constructed to withstand the most severe tremors. When completed, in 2017, the building will be one of the most seismically safe hospitals in the country, able to continue operations after an 8.0, or “great,” earthquake.
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Bioengineer designs diagnostic microscope costing less than $1
It’s an invention that would make TV’s secret agent MacGyver proud: a fully functional microscope that can be assembled from folded paper and a tiny bead of glass. And it only costs about 50 cents.
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Stanford/Packard scientists find new uses for existing drugs by mining gene-activity data banks
Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have paired up medicines and maladies with help from a molecular “Match.com.” When the scientists applied an “opposites attract” algorithm to publicly available databases, surprising sparks flew: They found potential compatibilities between numerous existing drugs and diseases for which those drugs had never before been thought to be beneficial.